| 50 Years of HOPE
Since 1958, Project HOPE has worked to make health care available for people around the globe, especially children. You may remember our hospital ship, the SS HOPE, that traveled the world providing care to those who otherwise would have had none. Today our work includes educating health professionals, community health workers and volunteers, providing medicines and supplies, strengthening health facilities, fighting communicable diseases such as TB and AIDS and chronic diseases such as diabetes and leading the debate on health policy issues through our acclaimed Health Affairs journal.
Our History
Project HOPE was the vision of William B. Walsh, M.D., a former medical officer who served aboard a destroyer during World War II. Dr. Walsh could not forget the poor health conditions he saw in the South Pacific - particularly the senseless affliction and death of young children who died of curable and preventable childhood illnesses.
Determined to make a difference, Dr. Walsh persuaded President Dwight D. Eisenhower to donate a U.S. Navy hospital ship, the USS Consolation, to be used as a floating medical center that would bring health education and improved care to communities around the world. With $150, a dream, and the support of corporations and individuals, the ship was transformed into the SS HOPE, the world’s first peacetime hospital ship, and Project HOPE was born.
From 1960 to 1974, the SS HOPE, staffed with highly trained medical volunteers set out on 11 voyages traveling to Indonesia, Vietnam, Peru, Ecuador, Guinea, Nicaragua, Colombia, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Tunisia, Jamaica, and Brazil. In addition to providing humanitarian assistance and medical treatment, medical volunteers aboard the ship shared their skills and knowledge with the people of developing nations- teaching while healing. For every volunteer on board, a counterpart in the host country was trained.
Project HOPE Today
The SS HOPE was retired in 1974, but the work of Project HOPE has continued. Today Project HOPE operates land-based programs in more than 35 countries. Now under the direction of John P. Howe, III, M.D., who became CEO and President of Project HOPE in 2001, Project HOPE continues to bring HOPE and solutions to address unmet medical needs around the world, especially for children.
Part of our success is due to our dedication to creating long-term solutions to health care challenges. Project HOPE only goes where it is invited and works to become a partner with the host country’s government and health authorities to assure sustainable health care and health education programs. For example, partnering with both national and provincial government leaders, Project HOPE has operated in China for more than 25 years implementing programs that address a variety of health care needs including HIV/AIDS, diabetes, medical training and nurse education. Project HOPE originally entered then-communist Poland in 1974 and continues to have a presence in the country today to address the health care needs of children through the University Children’s Hospital in Krakow.
Project HOPE also looks for new ways to deliver lifesaving health care programs and often partners with government, business, academic, military and a variety of health care professionals – sometimes all at once – to provide the best, most effective and most efficient health care to countries in need.
In 2005, immediately following the Indian Ocean Tsunami, Project HOPE volunteers again returned to ship-board care, in a unique partnership with the U.S. Navy, to provide humanitarian assistance to the devastated region. Volunteers from 37 states worked aboard the USNS Mercy providing care for the thousands of tsunami survivors and helping to deliver more than $9 million worth of humanitarian aid.
The partnership with the U.S. Navy has continued with missions to the U.S. Gulf Coast aboard the USNS Comfort following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and return trips to the tsunami stricken areas of Southeast Asia in 2006. Since engaging with the U.S. Navy in 2005 to provide relief in the wake of the catastrophic Indian Ocean Tsunami, Project HOPE has participated in ten humanitarian assistance health education missions with more than 600 HOPE volunteers and treated nearly 300,000 people in 27 countries in Latin America, Southeast Asia and West Africa. Several additional missions in partnership with the U.S. Navy are planned for 2009.
Whether delivering health care, health education and humanitarian assistance through our land–based programs, or sending volunteers aboard US Navy ships to provide ship-board care, Project HOPE’s mission remains the same: To achieve sustainable advances in health care around the world by implementing health education programs and providing humanitarian assistance in areas of need.
Over the course of our history, Project HOPE has provided much needed health education programs and humanitarian assistance to people in nearly 100 countries, distributed nearly $2 billion of lifesaving medicines and medical equipment and trained more than two million health care professionals. For more than 15 years, Project HOPE has expended 90 cents or more of every dollar directly to our programs and services.
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